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Like many successful actors, Allan Hawco finds himself living a bicoastal existence. But in his case, the defining bodies of water aren’t the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but Conception Bay and Lake Ontario.

As a native Newfoundlander, he couldn’t be happier that Republicof Doyle, his TV series set in St. John’s, NL., has been renewed for a sixth season on CBC while many other programs felt the budgetary headsman’s axe.

And as a stage actor plying his trade in Toronto, he’s thrilled to return to the group he co-founded, The Company Theatre, after a five-year absence.

The play that brought him back, Belleville, has already been a hit in New York and Chicago, making its young author, Amy Herzog, a force to be reckoned with. The production officially opening Thursday at the Berkeley Street Theatre stands poised to give her a hat-trick in North America’s three largest theatre cities.

“She wasn’t quite 30 when she wrote the script,” enthuses Hawco before a day of rehearsals, “and for her to have been so young and to have created such a deep, deep piece of material is deeply disturbing for me.

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Republic of Doyle star Allan Hawco returns to his theatre roots.(CP)

“By the end of next season on Doyle, I’ll have written 77 episodes of hourly television, but I’m still in awe of one script like this. You start working on many pieces of theatre and the holes in the plot become apparent so quickly if the nuts and bolts aren’t there. But with this script, every layer that you pull back reveals something deeper. There’s more to discover every day.”

The script of Belleville is so packed with twists and turns of character revelation that to mention much more than the title requires a spoiler alert.

Suffice it to say that it’s about a young married American couple living in Paris and how their lives start falling apart when the wife returns home unexpectedly from a cancelled yoga class to find her husband surfing the web for porn.

“There are a lot of themes going on here, which could be expressed as, ‘Is anyone what they ever seem to be?’ or ‘Can you ever really know your partner?’” says Hawco. “And hanging over it all is a portrait of a certain generation now in their late 20s who have a real sense of entitlement. People of a certain age believing they’re entitled to whatever they want.

“And although right from the beginning you say, ‘Something’s going on here,’ it’s not until the very end that it’s apparent what it is.”

A play like that needs a special kind of director and Hawco has one in Jason Byrne, the unconventional Irishman who has guided The Company Theatre through some of its biggest hits (A Whistle in the Dark, Festen).

“Jason’s not very traditional,” chuckles Hawco. “You may think the trajectory of a scene is from A to B, but he has a robust approach and tears at all the thousands of objectives, all the millions of possibilities he wants you to explore in rehearsal, so that you’re ready for absolutely anything.

“He doesn’t ‘block’ a show,” explains Hawco, using the theatre term for staging the action. “He approaches the work so that there’s only one answer and we have to discover it. He fights that urge to take us to a place that he’s predetermined and I personally love his method of working.”

He’s equally enthusiastic about the tremendous success of his Newfoundland cops-and-robbers series, Republic of Doyle. With solid enough viewership after five seasons that CBC has brought it back for a sixth, it was also recently sold to 80 per cent of the United States in a syndication deal.

“I’d actually forgotten about that until a friend texted me and said, ‘Friday night in Florida and Doyle is on the air,’” Hawco laughs. “‘How cool is that?’ and I’d have to agree with him.”

Hawco says, “The major thing I’d attribute its success to is that it’s a lot of fun. If we were to make a cold, dark-hearted crime drama in St. John’s, the sound of TVs being turned off would have been deafening. But we go for the comedy and the sense of humour, the light approach; the rock ’n’ roll barrel- through-this-hour tactic seems to work.

“But it’s minus any silliness. I wanted people to see our city the way we see it and love our city the way we love it. I didn’t want the rest of Canada to feel excluded. I wanted them to watch us. Otherwise you get cancelled.”

But that’s not happening, at least not this season, which means Hawco will continue to be bicoastal, in his unique Canadian way, for at least one more season.

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